University of Virginia Library

III

What did the dime novel stand for? What influence did it have on the minds of its readers? What forces did it represent in the evolution of American society?

The aim of the original dime novel was to give, in cheap and wholesome form, a picture of American wild life. At the time when it began to be published, 1860, less than fifteen years had passed since the country's boundary had been pushed from the Sabine, the Red, and the Arkansas rivers, and the Rocky Mountains, onward to the Pacific. In that decade and a half we had gained Texas, Oregon, New Mexico, and California, and had enlarged the national area to an extent equal to that of the entire territory east of the Mississippi. A real frontier in 1860 along the line of the Missouri and the Arkansas, with thousands of fighting Indians beyond that line, and some of them east of it, gave the reader an ardent concern in the adventures in Malaeska, Seth Jones, Massasoit, and other tales which told of life when the frontier was in New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. These tales had both contemporaneousness and vitality.

"As editor I sought the best work of the best writers in that particular field of fiction," said Mr. Victor a few years ago to the author of this article. "All was up to an excellent standard of literary merit. The detective and love story came later, when rank competition on the ten-cent trade made it seem necessary to introduce these elements. Almost without exception the original dime novels were good. Their moral was high. All were clean and instructive."

This judgment by the man who shaped these little books will be accepted by most persons who remember them in their best days. Ethically they were uplifting. The hard drinkers, and the grotesquely profane and picturesquely depraved persons who take leading roles in many of the dime novels of recent times were inexorably shut out from their progenitors of Beadle's days.

These tales incited a love of reading among the youth of the country. Though

making no pretensions to be historical novels, they often dealt with historical personages. Many of the boys and girls who encountered Pontiac, Boone, the renegade Girty, Mad Anthony, Kenton, and Black Hawk in their pages were incited to find out something more about those characters and their times, and thus they were introduced to much of the nation's story and geography. Manliness and womanliness among the readers were cultivated by these little books, not by homilies, but by example. It can be truthfully said that the taste and tone of the life of the generation which grew up with these tales were improved by them.

No age limit was set up among Beadle's readers. Lincoln was one of them. So was Seward, and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. Report of a later day had it that Toombs — who, however, as an officer of the Confederacy, was on the wrong side to find them accessible in their early days — was a devourer of these tales when he could get at them. "The man," said Zachariah Chandler, "who does not enjoy Onomoo, the Huron, has no right to live."

One at least of Beadle's tales registered itself in the politics of the time. Maum Guinea, Mrs. Victor's slavery tale, which issued at a critical moment in the Civil War, and which, republished in London (all Beadle's novels were republished in London until 1866), circulated by the tens of thousands in England, had a powerful influence in aid of the Union cause at a time when a large part of the people of that country favored the recognition of the independence of the Southern Confederacy. Mr. Victor's own "Address to the English People," issued at the same time, and in connection with the London edition of the novels, was widely distributed in England, and helped to overcome the sentiment which was clamoring for the breaking of the blockade and the purchase of Southern cotton for Lancashire's idle mills.

"My dear fellow," said Henry Ward Beecher to Mr. Victor afterward, "your little book and Mrs. Victor's novel were a telling series of shots in the right spot." This is testimony which counts. Beecher was a special commissioner from Lincoln to England in 1863, to counteract the hostility to the Union cause in the Palmerston cabinet and among the aristocracy.

The very small claim which the black man ever had upon the dime novelists ended with Appomattox and emancipation; but the red man had a far longer and more prosperous career. While Red Cloud, Black Kettle, and their compatriots ravaged the frontier, the Indian tales had an easy ascendancy. The annihilation of Colonel Fetterman and one hundred of his troops near Fort Phil Kearney in 1866, and the slaughter of Custer and two hundred and fifty of his men on the Little Big Horn in 1876, sold forest and prairie stories by millions of copies. But that was near the end of the Indian's service for the fictionists. The campaign against Chief Joseph and the Nez Perces in 1877, and the rounding up of Geronimo and the Apaches in 1886, shut up the last of the descendants of King Philip and Pontiac on the reservations, and the novelists had to turn to other fields for material. Before Sitting Bull's ghost-dance irruption at Pine Ridge in 1890, the cowboy and detective tales had supplanted the Indian story in the popular favor.

For a few years the Santa Fe trader and the cowboy ran a flourishing career among the dime novelists. Soon after the Mexican war Capt. Mayne Reid, one of the heroes of that conflict, began his tales of the Southwest — Rifle Rangers, Scalp Hunters, Captain of the Rifles, and the rest of them, — some of which told of bloody deeds along the Santa Fe trail, and a few of which were reprinted among Beadle and Adams's "dimes" and "half-dimes." Like most of the early cowboy tales, these stories had Indians among their leading characters, intermixed with "Greasers."

The alien white ingredient in these tales injected an element of variety which the youthful reader appreciated. Reid had seen the Mexican at close range. He knew enough of the Mexican language to make his imprecations and objurgations — his "Sacre-e-s" and "Carambas" — sound real. This delighted the boy readers, and set the fashion in profanity which later writers in this field followed. Reid, J. E. Badger, Oll Coomes, P. S. Warne, and others, who told of the wild riders of the plains, red, yellow, and white, made every foot of ground between the Missouri and the Sierra Nevadas, and the Arkansas and the Rio Grande, familiar to dime novel-readers.

More than a quarter of a century ago, however, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railway ended the days of the old trail and its story tellers. Between the railroads which transported the cattle from the ranges to the stockyards, and the barbed wire fences of the settlers who are abolishing the ranges, the cowboy as a picturesque feature of the Western landscape has passed out, and the dime novel will know him no more. This leaves the detective in possession of the stage.

In certain directions the detective tale has attractions for writers and readers beyond those offered by the average Indian story. The white "bad man" is more versatile in his badness than is his red or yellow counterpart. His field of activities is far wider. For the past half century the Indian's operations have been shut in between the Missouri and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, but the white crook's ravages have covered the whole landscape between the two oceans. Aiken's Black Hoods of the Shasta made life exhilarating in the neighborhood of the Golden Gate, but in most of his most popular tales the action centred in New York. In Boston, St. Louis, Philadelphia, New Orleans, St. Paul, and other towns, the Vidocqs of Harold Payne, William H. Manning, Edward Willett, J. W. Osbon, and others cut their Gordian knots.

Calling the roll of the items in the vast output of Wheeler, Ingraham, Aiken, and their associates, it would seem that there could not be enough truth in the United States to last them. No complaint of this sort, however, was ever made by any of their constituents. In their pages the reader encountered life in all tints of shade and brightness. His imagination was kindled. He was incited to do things; and commonly the things which he wanted to do were heroic.

There were no problems in any of the dime novels, old or new, not even in Maum Guinea. Duganne's Massasoit appeared before psychology was invented. If a paragraph or two of Arthur Dimmesdale's soul torture had strayed into any of Beadle's novels, the whole series would have been ruined. The things which were done in those little books were physical, and they were told in language that made pictures in the mind. There were no verbal puzzles in any of them, like those which James or Meredith impose. Long ago James said novelists ought to make their readers do a share of the work. Capt. Mark Wilton, Major S. S. Hall, Dr. Frank Powell, and their coworkers believed that their duty to their readers was to entertain them.

Between the writer and his constituents there was a bond of affection which incited him to make them glad to be alive. In the mind of every healthy boy there is romance. For that boy's entertainment the producer of dime fiction strewed romance through farm, mining camp, and city street. Out of his surroundings, however sordid, the boy was lifted. He became, to himself, the centre of the universe. At the particular spot on the globe on which he stood all the parallels and the meridians converged. In no more intense a degree than this did exaltation ever come to the Count of Monte Cristo; — the world was his. What was Edmond Dantes's paltry twenty million dollars to the vast treasures, physical and spiritual, spread out by Osbon before "Plucky Paul, the Boy Prospector," and his tens

of thousands or hundreds of thousands of readers?

And the boy got all of this without any prefaces. The action began right in the first line. No little Peterkin ever needed to ask any Old Kaspar what this was all about. The battles with Indians and "Greasers," the capture of road agents and bank burglars, and the retribution which hit the villain who attempted to cheat the girl out of her patrimony, told their story in language so plain that the wayfaring man, though a fool, never made any mistake in grasping it.

From Beadle's days onward most of the dime tales have been American. Names, scenes, atmosphere, are familiar. In reading them the American boy's soul soared and sang. This is why the average youth who found Rob Roy and Ivanhoe dull was immensely entertained by Ellis's Bill Biddon, or Leon Lewis's Daredeath Dick, King of the Cowboys.

Were these things all illusions? Many of them were, yet they were pleasing illusions. Illusions jolt us every day, which the dime novelists never touch, and which we would not want to read about. Some of us might like occasionally to see time's clock turned back to the days when the world was young enough and rich enough to have illusions that make us glad.

Was everything that the dime necromancers told us melodrama? Much of it unquestionably was. But an age which has seen a nation rise from Balboa's isthmus at the wave of a Prospero wand from Washington; which has recently looked on while a people in the Caribbean committed suicide; which is watching Nome's argonauts, up under the Pole Star, rival the glories of the Comstock under the reign of Mackay, Flood, and O'Brien; and which held its breath in November, 1906, while Roosevelt and Croker, like Castor and Pollux, rushed to rescue the nation from a New York editor who had built up an army in a night, has no right to object to melodrama in fiction.